Music as Black Archive

This seminar explores Black musical history as a vital site of memory, archive, and storytelling, centering music within Black experience, history, and culture. Framed as a seminar on musical thought, the course begins in the early 1900s and moves to the present day, tracing how Black music in the United States has functioned as a vessel for preserving history, shaping Black intellectual traditions, and narrating lived experience. Through practices of deep listening, students critically examine not only what we hear, but how we hear—interrogating racialized listening and the ways Black sound has been interpreted, appropriated, and institutionalized. Drawing on the ideals of early twentieth-century Black intellectuals, the course positions Black music as a space of resistance and an archive in its own right. Students engage Black archive practices and explore their connection to Black intellectual history, considering how African diasporic lineages shape Black music as ancestral expression. The seminar asks: What is Black music’s function in the United States? How has it helped form the broader national narrative? Through close study of genres such as funk, Hip Hop, opera, jazz, and R&B, in connection with and artists and composers such as Duke Ellington, Beyonce, D’Angelo, and Betty Davis,  students examine how Black musical forms carry cultural memory across generations. The course also interrogates how Black culture is displayed and curated in spaces not originally built for Blackness, challenging traditional frameworks of preservation and performance. Ultimately, the seminar invites students to understand  black music not simply as sound, but as a intentional intellectual, cultural, and historical practice.